As a whole, The Prank offers a scathing indictment of Russian society in Chekhov’s time. Fedorov was an experienced and vigilant censor. It is not surprising that he blocked it.
The Prank, however, is much more than a social critique. It is a funny, well-written, carefully crafted book that is a time capsule of the reading tastes and moods of the Russian public of the time. It is also a record of Chekhov as an imaginative and ambitious young writer. Although the book has never been published in Russia, individual stories are well-known and beloved by Russian readers, so much so that quotes from the stories have become set expressions and catchphrases used in Russia to the present day: “Such a thing cannot be, because it could never be,” from “A Letter to a Learned Neighbor”; “Even the bloodthirsty Circassians wouldn’t stoop to that,” from “Before the Wedding.”
Anglophone readers, however, will be unfamiliar with both these stories and this Chekhov (“Artists’ Wives” and “1,001 Passions, or, A Dreadful Night” appear here in their first English translation). The Chekhov the English intelligentsia fell in love with early in the twentieth century (the so-called Chekhov craze replacing an earlier Dostoyevsky cult) was taken to be a writer of resigned pessimism, an emanation of fin de siècle languor, melancholy, and inertia.14 Chekhov has come to be seen as a good deal richer and more complicated since then, but the idea long persisted that the early humorous stories were written just for money and are not the “real” Chekhov. Only recently have things begun to change (much, however, remains to be translated, including his very funny early feuilletons).15
The Prank needs to be seen as an organic part of Chekhov’s body of work. The same problems, themes, characters, and behaviors occupy Chekhov at the end of his literary career as they do at its earliest beginnings, sometimes remarkably so. Chekhov’s last story, “The Bride” (“Nevesta,” 1903), which echoes the parodies of The Prank by its parodic inversion of the sentimental nineteenth-century plot (a fallen woman is saved from a life of sin through marriage, here turned into a woman being saved from a marriage for a life of “sinful” freedom), again attacks the corruption of Russian marriage, the dismal lives of failed artists, disregard for other human beings, and the serfdom mentality (two supposedly cultured ladies allow their serving women to sleep on the floor in the kitchen on ragged bedding crawling with bedbugs and cockroaches). Chekhov’s last play, The Cherry Orchard (1904), closes with the same heartbreaking figure of the old man abandoned to die that first appeared in “St. Peter’s Day.”
In The Prank, as in his later works, Chekhov records life’s quirks without moralizing commentary, leaving the reader to reach his own conclusions, the very quality that sets him apart from his great predecessors. Where Dostoyevsky is passionately questioning and Tolstoy passionately lecturing, Chekhov is dispassionately, almost clinically, observant. Shortly before his death, Chekhov wrote with wry humor to his wife, Olga Knipper-Chekhova: “You ask, what is life? This is the same as asking, ‘What is a carrot?’ A carrot is a carrot and nothing more is known about it.”16
And, most important, these stories are a pleasure. To draw on my own experience, when I first read Antosha Chekhonte as a young girl back in stagnation-era Leningrad, I was delighted by his humor and inventiveness. I was also struck—especially against the background of tame state-sanctioned humor—by how subversive his wit was. When my family emigrated from Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, we took the ten-volume edition of Chekhov’s works with us and it still stands on my bookshelf, somewhat the worse for wear, in its gray cover with a stylized gold seagull on the spine. I’ve known these stories for years, but in translating them I still find myself laughing. To readers of English I hope they have the effect of an early photograph of someone met in middle age: At first, the unlined young face may seem jarringly unfamiliar. But look more closely, see the smiling eyes and the familiar features: “Yes, that’s him! Of course, that’s him,” you will say. “Time has changed him but it is still the same man!”
—MARIA BLOSHTEYN
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
IN MANY ways, Constance Garnett’s century-old translations continue to set the tone for Anton Chekhov in English. Garnett was a prodigious translator—single-handedly she established the canon of Russian writers in English—and her translations continue to matter, not only because of their historical importance but because whatever their flaws and faults they are still eminently readable. Nonetheless, the “capital fellows,” “by Joves,” and “old chaps” that Garnett scatters liberally throughout her Chekhov (and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy) do a particular disservice to Chekhov, whose prose continues to sound remarkably fresh and contemporary in Russian.
As it happened, the stories in The Prank escaped the Garnett treatment—her source text excluded the stories of the early 1880s—and until quite recently they have continued to be largely ignored by translators. They present an opportunity to hear a new Chekhov and to hear Chekhov anew, as I’ve argued in my introduction, but to a translator they present a number of specific and peculiar challenges. Chekhov was a collector of unusual Russian surnames, and funny and unusual surnames are strewn throughout the stories. I’ve had to leave these names untranslated because they lose all their charm outside of the Russian linguistic context (what does it add to one’s appreciation of “St. Peter’s Day,” for instance, if one knows that Nekrichikhvostov actually means Do-not-shout-tail-ov?). Then there are the parodies of Jules Verne and Victor Hugo (writers who are no longer as widely read as they were in Chekhov’s day), which, to complicate matters, feature stilted dialogue and stumbling sentences that send up the dreadful Russian translations of Verne and Hugo that Chekhov knew. The only solution I found to this problem was to stay as close to the original text as I could and hope that the readers of my translation would trust me enough to assume that I was not failing dismally to construct a fluent English sentence.
In general, I’ve sought to translate the stories as faithfully as possible into a modern English, based on my own North American idiolect. That may sound simply obvious but it was not, as I found, by any means simple to do.
I’m grateful to Edwin Frank, my editor at New York Review Books, for his close attention to the translation throughout. I’m especially grateful to Robert Chandler, Irina Mashinski, and Boris Dralyuk, who gave me an opportunity to witness their work on The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. The scholarship, craftsmanship, artistry, and passion that they brought to every word and line of every poem in that book inspired me, who had always thought of myself primarily as a scholar and critic, rather than translator, of Russian literature, to think again. The result is The Prank.
—M.B.
THE PRANK
ARTISTS’ WIVES
(Translated . . . from the Portuguese)
ALPHONSO Zinzaga, a free, utterly free citizen of the capital city of Lisbon, a young novelist, very famous (only to himself), showing signs of great promise (only to himself), was returning home exhausted and as hungry as the hungriest dog after a whole day of trudging the boulevards and making the rounds of editorial offices. Zinzaga resided in suite number 147 of a hotel that had figured in one of his novels as the Hotel of the Venomous Swan. He walked into suite 147, glanced around his tiny, narrow, low-ceilinged room, and sniffed in disdain. He lit a candle and, behold, a touching tableau—among heaps of paper, books, last year’s newspapers, rickety chairs, boots, robes, daggers, and nightcaps, on a small couch upholstered in blue-gray calico, slept his lovely wife, Amaranta. Filled with tenderness, Zinzaga approached her and, after taking thought, tugged her arm. She did not wake. He tugged her other arm. She sighed deeply, but she did not wake. He patted her on the shoulder, tapped her alabaster brow with his finger, gripped her foot by the shoe, yanked at her dress, sneezed so loudly that the entire hotel heard—and she never stirred.